This past April the Executive MBA Class of 2012 traveled to China, where they toured Beijing, Hong Kong, Shenzhen and Macau. What follows is a collection of photos and observations that capture their experience.

After graduating with a bachelor’s degree in engineering and economics in 2011, Tim Maloney decided to stay at Vanderbilt for one more year. Having a master’s in finance, he believed, would be an important differentiator in a difficult job market.

In addition to running her own company, Lazenby has a national advocacy role in the oil and gas industry, serving as Board Chair of the Independent Petroleum Association of America. Often the only woman in the room, she promotes understanding about industry concerns, including taxation, accessibility and regulation.

“I am genetically an engineer,” he says. “My wife remarked one day as we were traveling, ‘Why do you always have a bag full of wires when we go on vacation?’ It’s just always been part of my identity.”

For a guy from Middle Tennessee, Brent Turner, MBA’99, sure uses a lot of nautical terms. That may be the impact of having lived near the Puget Sound in Seattle for the past 12 years, but his choice of words is fitting nonetheless. Turner is helping steer the future of Owen as chair of the school’s Alumni Board, and his enthusiasm, drive and leadership are just the types of invaluable assets you’d want in someone at the helm.

Mario Ramos has a hard time containing his excitement about the freshly unveiled Americas MBA for Executives program at Vanderbilt. To hear him talk, you’d think that he’s among the inaugural class of 12 Owen students who’ll be traveling to Brazil, Canada and Mexico in the coming months to learn about those economies.

Few people get to witness the evolution of a brand new hospital from an insider’s perspective. Even fewer get to play a hand in how it takes shape. Yet, thanks in no small part to Vanderbilt’s Master of Management in Health Care program, four health care administrators from Huntsville, Ala., have had just such an opportunity.

Ashoke “Bappa” Mukherji is no stranger to pressure. Soon after graduating from Vanderbilt with both an MBA and a law degree, he was thrust into one of the more challenging roles a budding young attorney could ask for—sitting second chair in a first-degree murder trial. It was his first trial ever.

In chemistry, if you want to get a reaction, you have to find a way to bring the right molecules together and have them bump into each other with sufficient force. Sometimes you need a catalyst to get things started.

Market impact. It is part of the very fiber of Owen’s finance department. Members of the school’s finance faculty are not only contributing to the industry’s intellectual underpinnings and analytical tools but also training students who, as Vanderbilt alumni, are putting theory into practice worldwide.

Imagine going to see your dermatologist and leaving her office knowing you have several swollen lymph nodes. That is exactly what happened to me in early August 2009. I was told “run, don’t walk” to my primary care physician, which I did—the dermatologist’s office even called to make sure I had followed their directions.

Christopher Parks found himself facing an all-too-common dilemma. He and his mother, who was in the midst of cancer treatments, were sitting in her living room going through a stack of her medical bills and those of his father, who had died recently.

Ray Sumner, MBA’10, woke up in a bed with white sheets. He recognized his mother, who was holding his right hand. She had traveled from their family farm on Staten Island to keep vigil at his bedside in Bethesda Naval Hospital.

Some of the grandmothers—only in their 50s, but aged by the hardships of living in one of the world’s poorest places—liked the porridge so much that they started dancing, hopping on one foot and then the other, grinning toothless smiles and kicking dust onto their colorful skirts.

During lean economic times, many business owners look for a lifeboat. In the case of David Ingram, Chairman and President of Ingram Entertainment Inc. (IEI), his came in the form of beer. Or beer distribution, that is.

For Tom Clock, MBA’98, it all clicked when Owen’s fledgling rugby club carpooled to Fort Campbell, Ky., to take on a team from the 101st Airborne. “It was with those guys that I think we crystallized our identity,” says Clock. “Hanging out with them, we became a team.”

Twenty years can create some distance between a university and one of its graduates. Not so for Kevin Kaseff. A member of the Class of 1989, Kaseff fondly recalls both the friends he made at Owen and his academic experience. “I loved the school and the experience,” he says. “I’ve maintained those friendships the past [...]

Professor Germain Böer and I have much in common. We both arrived at Owen in the same year, we both have practiced accounting, and we both are serial entrepreneurs. This last item is a shared passion of ours. Whether starting his own business before coming to Owen or launching the Center for Entrepreneurship at the [...]

When investment banker Rob Louv, MBA’97, met with a Texas entrepreneur in 2008 about selling a company, neither was aware that they shared an important common link: Both had graduated from the Owen School. The entrepreneur, Jack Long, MBA’83, had contacted Louv’s San Francisco firm, Montgomery & Co., on reputation alone, but the coincidence helped him make up his mind about using Louv to shop his company to potential buyers.

During the 2009 spring semester, a group of 10 second-year students took part in the inaugural Real Estate Capstone course that saw them devise a long-term growth plan for downtown Lebanon, Tenn., a city just east of Nashville. The specific thrust involved transit-oriented development.

Bill Christie, Frances Hampton Currey Professor of Management, was just a junior faculty member at the Owen School in the early ’90s when he and Paul Schultz, a colleague at Ohio State University, stumbled across some data that pointed toward collusion among market makers at NASDAQ. Christie and Schultz discovered that the majority of the [...]

Are entrepreneurs born or made? Professor of Management Germain Böer believes it’s a bit of both. On the one hand, he says, “You have to know how to reach your customers, how to build an operation that works smoothly. These are things that many people who start companies don’t really know. That’s why, for entrepreneurs, [...]

Fortunately for Rob Hunter, MBA’91, clients weren’t in the habit of visiting the original headquarters of his fledgling company, Alliance Communications. Had they walked into the office—actually, a trailer in a parking lot—in 1999, they might have noticed that Alliance, which manages sophisticated telecommunications for its clients, lacked a phone system capable even of transferring calls from one extension to another.

The 1995 conference sponsored by the Owen School’s Financial Markets Research Center is one that Adena Testa Friedman will not soon forget. Just two years removed from graduation, she was back on campus watching Bill Christie, a favorite professor of hers, endure a searing critique from his former mentor Merton Miller, a Nobel laureate in economics. And as if that weren’t awkward enough, Friedman was actually rooting against Christie.

Sharran Srivatsaa, MBA’08, remembers arriving in Tupelo, Miss., well after dark and encountering what most people would expect to see on a small-town Thursday night: very little. “There wasn’t much going on.” In the morning he saw the place, physically and figuratively, in an entirely different light.

They are among the nation’s most compelling potential customers— the nearly 100,000 men, women and children who are in line for the fewer than 30,000 organ transplants that will be performed this year. That staggering gap is caused both by a scarcity of donors and by the fact that only 70 to 80 percent of the organs actually harvested can be utilized because of problems with quality or preservation.

Michael Lapré, an Owen faculty member who studies operations and performance in the airline industry, sees many challenges ahead for the major airlines. Maintaining customer satisfaction will continue to be a problem, he predicts, as fuel costs continue to soar and the industry works to keep costs down. “Right now the biggest issue is cost,” [...]

Grounded. In airplane parlance, it’s an ironic way to describe someone who oversees the fifth largest airline in the country, but that’s exactly how friends and colleagues of US Airways Chairman and CEO Doug Parker, MBA’86, view him. While he’s adept at managing the 30,000-foot view, they say he remains one of the most down-to-earth people they know—even as his embattled industry confronts soaring costs and plummeting customer satisfaction.

Michael Lapré, an Owen faculty member who studies operations and performance in the airline industry, sees many challenges ahead for the major airlines. Maintaining customer satisfaction will continue to be a problem, he predicts, as fuel costs continue to soar and the industry works to keep costs down.

“Right now the biggest issue is cost,” says Lapré, the E. Bronson Ingram Associate Professor in Operations Management. “They need to figure out an appropriate cost structure that makes it at least appealing to compete with an airline like Southwest. That’s not easy. You want to pay your employees appropriately. But that’s tough because other airlines, the discount airlines, have much cheaper labor. Then there are fuel costs, and figuring out how many different types of planes you can profitably have in the fleet. So there are cost-structure issues, fleet issues, labor issues. It’s not easy.” keep reading »